#2366 Jeff Rosenstock - We Cool?

Rosenstock's latest is my favorite album of 2016, so let's tip back.


We Cool?'s not as overwhelmingly hooky or overpoweringly sincere as Worry, lacking that strangely satisfying glimpse of the crumbling New York scene - but the core magic's totally in place, roaring with love, exhaustion, determination, grappling with death, grasping at joy and clinging for dear life, all set to endless storming Weezer guitars, spiked with the Pixies, Thin Lizzy, and everything soaring.

There's truly personal moments, real rock and roll let-ya-ins, a bipolar rocket that can't stop moving or it'll start thinking, so the guitars just keep coming - an effortless piece of almost-pop-punk panacea for the desperately crowded and hopelessly alone 4.5/5

#2365 Yesterday's New Quintet - Angles without Edges

Madlib's first YNQ album's halfway between instrumental hip hop and sullen, bubbling jazz. Five fictional members give Jackson room to lay down murky, hitched, off-center grooves. It's hornless, leaning on synth, bass and vibraphone ringing, never straying overly far from its central tones, never giving you any real hooks or choruses or signposts, the music never changing, but the listen becoming claustrophobic and labyrinthine, running through the Goblet of Fire maze aimlessly in superslow motion.

Interesting, but never altogether pleasant, and remarkably difficult to actually listen to all the way through 2.5/5

#2364 Anderson .Paak - Malibu

After multiple breathless recommendations, I found my first listen to this one so _underwhelming_

And I get it a bit better now - it's got a smoothness, a lazy bit of bounce, with just the tinniest spike of that dark-jazz vibe that's been bubbling up the last couple years.

But, nah.

The production's too produced, too smooth, somewhere between JT and Jamiroquai. And all the sounds repeat and repeat, little custom studio-polished session-musician loops, with none of the grit and history of a proper sample, none of the spark or sizzle of a proper live backing. And every song just blends together, same basic feel, same basic tempo, wildly overstuffed at 16 tracks.

And Paak himself doesn't save it - he's chained to his voice's raspy spine, with desperately little emotional or musical range, always sounding the same kind of ever-so-slightly pained.

There's no stakes, no commitment, just a easy groove to cruise to nowhere in.

We're ready for a funk revivial, but we can do better than this 3/5

#2363 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree

Never been a big Nick Cave guy, but this feels like the time.

The electronic skitchering fits the moment, as everything falls apart in increments.

The moaning abstraction, it slots alongside Coen, Bowie, loss.

Now more than ever, maybe, we need the sound of crumbling, splitting, loss of hope, glimpse of hope. This is that. Repetition, desperation lost, quit, sounds like ghosts with grudges, taking one last, long, slow swing at vengeance 3.5/5

#2362 Swet Shop Boys - Cashmere

With Heems on board there's a touch of that old Das Racist vibe: blunt instrument beats, loose and loping rhymes, infinite irreverence. But this is post-fucking around, those political undercurrents running rampant right over the top: American racism and distrust, defiance and flashes of fear, fearless flashes of culture and sound from across the Indian subcontinent -- with a borderline concept-album obsession with Airport security in particular.  And isn't that where it all comes to a head? Where you're trying to be a citizen of the world, and American authority has near-complete power.

Cashmere's never predictable: every line's packed with swerves, packed into twisty structures, in an album that can't sit still - it's wooly, daring, tense and __every once in a while__, a bit of goofy fun (Tiger Hologram!). All we can hope for right about now 4/5

#2361 FM-84 - Atlas

There's a big 80's electonic revival that's been going for a few years now -- it went pop a few years ago circa M83 and Cut Copy, but an underground pulse keeps the dream alive.

At its best, this is the best of that.

Wistfulness, escape, possibility. Those chord tuned into your soul, those arpeggios outlining its outlines. The instrumental tracks are better than most.

The problem's the vocal tracks. That's where FM-84 go from conjuring the spirit of the 80's to reanimating its soulless corpse, pet cemetary style. Those songs are just too Top Gun soundtrack, and kill the flow. But in between, again, better than most, take me away 3.5/5

#2360 Frank Ocean - Blonde

Welcome back, team! It's mid-Jan, bouncing back from vacation, getting caught back up, back in the swing of things.

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I got a whoooole theory about how rock (the movement, not the musicalogical sound) is having its baton picked up by hip hop, and he's an album that blurs it all into nothing.

One foothold -- rock (loosely) used to be where we found those albums quite-unlike, those frame-knockers, those eye wideners. But here's the latest offering that hits it, and it's... soul? dashes of hip hop? But with more in common with Bon Iver's deconstructions, Radiohead's post-band production gestations, the Microphones' expulsions. If Frank Ocean was white, we'd have no problem calling this abstract rock, Spiderland, Laughing Stock, a warming piece of post-rock, but given his background/backstory/musical path to now, we're all wind-twisting tittering twits.

The spirit of rock is to find something sincere, something sincerely delivered, realness. To escape populism, popular grasping, and this is that - it has that audacity, that fuckitism.

--

Beat's the classic identifier of popular style. Hip hop beat. Rock beat on the 2 / 4. Four to the floor. Unts unts // boots and pants. Here's this liquid sound with more guitars than beats, with more unidentifiable sounds than guitars, more mysterious glimpses and glances and goundings than sounds, even.

Which is all to say, this is fucking exciting. Thrilling, unknowable, personal, electric, and totally fucking unchained from any kind of sound, meandering under its own blasted volition, inspiring us to stumble around in the darkness.

It is adventurous. Thank god. There's still room for adventurous. Still room for being surprised. As Ocean murmurs and clips and moans and swoons his way through a labyrinth of emotions, senses, thoughts, as humble and important and complex and elemental as the thoughts racing through your mind every day -- it's the spattering synapse of being a confused person hurtling through life, cast as light on the ceiling 4.5/5

#2359 Solange - A Seat at the Table

An album so minimal, so distant, it's barely there.

The production's prodding and icy, mistaking unpredictable blurts of sound for jazziness, the way a bad horror movie mistakes jump scares for scariness.

Lyrically it's all or nothing, deadpan bluntness or vague mad-libsian wisdom-by-association, with ten times as many limp rhymes as actual insights.

And even when Solange has a personal message or meaning, it's delivered with all the theater of a commencement address, never deigning to welcome or impress or entertain. The guest spoken word segments are the most-moving parts, but they don't make a moving, personal, or affecting album, absent any actual musicmaking. Look at Common, Chance, Kanye, Frank, Heems, or hell, Beyonce, for how this can be done better.

Three of the song titles start with "don't", a crucial section talks about how this isn't for me, and the overall tone is of pushing at arms-length-plus. I believe Solange. Good for her for having the courage to make this seemingly very sincere, personal record. Sincerely. But as music or entertainment or art, we can agree to agree, it is squarely not for me 2/5

#2358 Kevin Morby - Singing Saw

Kevin Morby knows music. You can feel the confidence in the way he moves through chords and tones and moods. He sways and swerves with like man who knows every mogul, rock, tree, every breeze and twittering feather on a mountain as he cuts his lines with geometric precision.

And from the confidence comes the power to flourish and embellish effortlessly, to pack every rich tone with strings and horns and bass, and yes, the occasional singing saw, in the grand spirit of Okkervil River, Wilco, Band of Horses, and M. Ward. This is a fully realized domain. And unlike all that punk rock I like, there's no sense that the unexpected might happen, but in its place is a fully realized space, nuanced and inevitable, the likes of Guillermo del Toro or Herzog or Tarsem at the peak of their fictions. Guitars pull like worms, loamy textures and turning tones like rising suns at low angles through trees, sounds echoing off the dissipating overcast 4/5

#2357 Aphex Twin - Cheetah

Aphex Twin gets away with a lot. All his non-remixes and throwaways and pisstakes get filed under puckishly brilliant - so too goes his EP named after the notoriously fussy Cheetah ms800? It's unclear the role the synth played in this - it's mostly a series of agreeable, warm, buzzy thumpers that probably wouldn't get a second sniff if not for the ass that farted them.

Don't get me wrong, peak Aphex Twin's the shit. But there's nothing special here. The best bit is center two tracks of aimless, strange noise that sounds like it maybe was actually made on the ms800, so ploddingly abstract and demo-ey as it is -- adding up to 64 seconds of music. the Cirklon tracks are funky and agreeable in a jazz-adjacent old-Aphex kinda way, but this feels like an artist coasting on his second-wave of absence-fueled fame, and its hard not to be a little cynical about it 3/5

#2356 Childish Gambino - Awaken, My Love!

It's hard to escape the idea that Donald Glover's taking the piss. His prior Childish Gambino hiphop turns seemed like earnest variation at best, hokey once-removed Weird Al-ism at worst. And here he turns his eye to funk - specifically drawing /hard/ on Funkadelic spacy groovecraft and Sly communal up-an-attem.

But it's mostly for the best. I mean, first of all, that space hasn't been tapped half as hard as it deserves.

Second, this takes that space and grows it, into something wilder than even Clinton would have necessarily dared. It brings its own juice to the party. That bass, too, damn.

And the vocals are so thoroughly postproductioned: ripped, clipped, autotuned -- but, I buy it, somehow.

And, shit, that second side just gets spacy as shit, losing the thread altogether -- but its weirdly the right move.

This never quite escapes the orbit of its influences, always seeming relative-to, and at times (Zombies) it's just hokey. But it pulls off that Zappa-level yes-and often enough to win my affection, and occasional outright adoration. Derivative or not, it does what it does pretty darn well, and dammit, we're overdue for another dose of this shit 4/5

#2355 Noname - Telefone

Noname's got such a natural flow. Her production's so warm. It's natural, welcoming, glowing. Even as it dips through injustice, through deep-seated, well-earned pain, that never slips into bitterness or resentment.

That buzzy, languid, radiant backing helps, all that glowing bass and languid rhythm.

It's a source of earnestness, hope, positivity reflected off of darkness. In keeping with co-Chicagoan Chance, here pushing towards what needs to happen, what's happening be damned 4/5

#2354 The Rolling Stones - Blue and Lonesome

Stones get back to basics, do some blues covers. It works out about as good as you could hope for: Jagger can shout just fine, the band lays down perfectly good laid-back swagger, and everyone keeps it 100% no-frills. Not a single unexpected thing happens. If you'd walked out of a bar after an anonymous bunch of old guys did this set you'd say "those guys were actually really good" with mild surprise, and for better or worse, nothing'd tip you off that they were once anything more 3/5

#2353 YG - Still Brazy

Boom-bap West coast hip hop with plenty of modern mopey electronic buzz standing in for classic pfunk analog growl. It's got itself a groove, but all that bravado sounds out of time in 2016, and I'm spoiled by all this twisty, freeflowing stuff coming out lately - no patience for rap songs that repeat the name of the song 4 times a chorus x 4 choruses 2.5/5

#2352 Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, Oren Ambarchi - I Wonder If You Noticed "I'm Sorry" Is Such a Lovely Sound It Keeps Things from Getting Worse

Experimental music as vast and meandering as its album/song names. The endless pacing's hypnotic, but it desperately needs O'Rourke's guitar muscle to keep it moving - long stretches are too spare and dissonant to keep an active-listen level of attention 3/5

#2351 Jim O’Rourke / Fennesz - It's Hard for me to Say I'm Sorry

Fizzling, sputtering, beat-ish clips and sizzles, peppered across meandering pushes and pulls of sound. It's pretty, alien, strange, intriguing the closer you look, somehow at once a carefully crafted masterpiece and a dashed-off Pollockian spatter of sounds. The listen blurred reality, even if it failed to take me to a new one 3.5/5